What is Geofencing?
Definition
Geofencing draws a virtual boundary around a location, a depot, customer site, or restricted zone, and triggers alerts when a vehicle enters, exits, or dwells too long inside it.
Why it matters for Indian fleets
Geofences enforce authorised routes and stops, flag unauthorised detours (a common fuel-theft signal), and automate arrival/departure logging at customer sites.
How a geofence is defined
A geofence is a boundary drawn on a map and attached to a rule. Two shapes cover almost every fleet use case.
- Radius fences are a centre point plus a distance. They take seconds to create and suit customer sites, fuel stations and parking areas.
- Polygon fences trace an irregular outline. They are necessary where a radius would either miss part of the site or spill onto a public road, which is common for long warehouse compounds, mining pits and port areas.
The rule attached to the boundary matters as much as the shape. Entry and exit are the obvious triggers, but dwell time is usually the more valuable one: knowing a vehicle entered a customer site is routine, and knowing it has been inside for four hours is an exception worth acting on.
What geofences are actually used for in Indian fleets
- Automatic arrival and departure logging. Detention disputes turn on when a vehicle reached a site and when it was released. A geofence records both without depending on the driver to report them.
- Unauthorised stop detection. A halt outside any expected fence, particularly at night on a highway shoulder, is the classic precursor to fuel siphoning.
- Restricted zone enforcement. No-entry areas, city time-window restrictions and hazardous routes can be fenced so a breach raises an alert immediately rather than surfacing as a challan later.
- Yard and depot management. Counting what is inside the yard right now, without walking it.
- Route adherence. A corridor of fences along the planned route turns a vague sense that a vehicle went the wrong way into a specific, timestamped deviation.
Why geofences generate too many alerts, and how to fix it
The most common failure of a geofencing deployment is not technical. It is that the fleet creates hundreds of fences with entry and exit alerts on all of them, receives thousands of notifications a day, and stops reading any of them.
GPS drift makes this worse. A vehicle parked exactly on a boundary will appear to cross it repeatedly as the position estimate wanders, producing a stream of enter and exit events from a stationary vehicle.
Three adjustments fix most of it. Size fences generously so the boundary does not sit where vehicles park. Use a minimum dwell threshold so a brief crossing does not trigger. And alert on exceptions rather than on normal events: the useful alert is "has not left after three hours", not "arrived".
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between a geofence and a route?
A geofence is a boundary around a place and triggers on entering, leaving or dwelling inside it. A route is a path between places. Fleets often combine them, using a corridor of fences along a planned route to detect deviation from it.
How accurate is geofencing?
Accuracy depends on GPS position quality, typically within a few metres in the open and worse near tall buildings or under cover. This is why very small fences produce false crossings, and why a minimum dwell time is normally set before an event is raised.
Can geofencing detect fuel theft?
Indirectly, and effectively. Siphoning requires the vehicle to stop somewhere it was not meant to stop. A geofence rule that flags halts outside authorised areas, especially at night, surfaces exactly those events, and pairing it with fuel-level data confirms whether fuel actually left the tank.
How many geofences should a fleet create?
Fewer than most fleets start with. Creating a fence for every location and alerting on every entry and exit produces alert fatigue within days. Fence the places where an exception genuinely needs action, and prefer dwell-time and non-arrival rules over routine arrival notifications.
Related MoboSafe workflows
Review the documented product scope and setup requirements for these related operational tasks.
Trip Management
Plan, monitor, and analyse fleet trips with vehicles, drivers, waypoints, documents, exception handling, and delivery records.
Geofencing & Fleet Alerts
Create vehicle geofences and configure entry, exit, dwell, speed, idle, harsh-driving, and device-offline alerts for your fleet.
Fleet Asset Management
Manage fleet vehicles, trailers, equipment, ownership, insurance documents, device assignments, and utilisation in MoboSafe.
Fleet APIs & Integrations
Configure MoboSafe integrations, API access, device connections, connection tests, usage monitoring, and dashcam backup settings.
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